1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to manually operated, wheeled vehicles, and particularly to four-wheeled, retail store shopping carts such as grocery baskets. More particularly, this invention relates to an adjustable height shopping cart with legs that fold up for transportation in a shopper's vehicle.
2. Description of Related Art
Grocery shopping carts are ubiquitous and quite familiar to most people. They usually comprise a large cargo basket supported at its rear by a cart body that includes a shelf beneath the basket, all supported on castors. The basket is open at the top and may include an infant seat atop the cart body near the shopper. Grocery cart baskets usually are tapered toward the front and include a movable rear wall that collapses inward to permit nesting of one cart into the rear of another, allowing a large number of carts to be stored in a minimum of space pending usage by shoppers.
The typical retail arrangement does not contemplate the shopping carts leaving the premises of the store where they are used for gathering goods. As a result, the shopper must first collect the goods for purchase by placing them into a cart basket, then unload them at a check-out counter where store employees box or sack them up into temporary containers and return them to the cart to be wheeled out to the shopper's vehicle. The shopper then must unload the cart again by placing the containers into a vehicle to be transported home. Yet again, the shopper must move the containers from the vehicle to an area within the shopper's premises where the goods may be used or stored for future use. A need exists for means for reducing the repeated handling of purchased goods between a retailer's shelves and a shopper's storage facilities.
Because of the retailer's motive to nest shopping carts when not in use, all shopping carts are substantially the same height. This one-size-fits-all strategy ignores significant variations in shoppers' statures. A need exists for means for adjusting retail shopping carts to a comfortable level for various individual shoppers of different heights.
Having unloaded their purchases into their vehicles from their shopping carts, shoppers abandon the carts in the retail store parking lot for retrieval by store personnel. Though many shoppers move their emptied carts to staging areas located around the store parking lot, some don't and some retailers don't provide such staging areas, so shoppers simply abandon the carts at random. Anyone whose automobile has received a parking lot nick from an errant, runaway shopping cart knows that this can lead to minor chaos during heavy shopping times when retail personnel don't promptly retrieve the carts. A need exists for an alternative to encouraging shoppers to leave empty shopping carts in retail store parking lots.
Large retail stores that rely on shopping carts must invest significantly in a large supply of such carts and a storage location for them when not in use. Shopping carts also become damaged with use and even stolen from parking lots, and retailers incur significant repair and replacement costs as a result. A need exists for means to relieve retail stores of the investment and maintenance costs of providing a large quantity of shopping carts for shoppers.